climate change

A global conference on climate change resilience in Miami on Tuesday highlighted the city’s efforts to respond to sea level rise and other extreme weather events.

Led by former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, representatives from the Global Commission on Adaptation toured the city’s flood prevention projects and met with Miami’s climate resilience leaders. Ban praised the city’s work to address sea level rise, saying Miami is a model for other places around the world under threat from climate change.

Wallace Broecker, a climate scientist who brought the term "global warming" into the public and scientific lexicon, died on Monday. He was 87.

Broecker, a professor in the department of earth and environmental science at Columbia, was among the early scientists who raised alarms about the drastic changes in the planet's climate that humans could bring about over a relatively short period of time.

Friday night's rainfall in Washington, D.C., has elevated 2018 to the wettest year on record for the nation's capital, and the rain is expected to continue throughout the weekend.

The National Weather Service announced the rainfall record was surpassed at 6:26 a.m. on Saturday. So far, 61.34 inches of rain have fallen in Washington this year, breaking a record set in 1889 of 61.33 inches.

An additional inch or so of rain may fall through Sunday, pushing the tally even higher.

Leaders from nearly 200 countries, including the United States, are at a big climate conference in Poland this week. They are struggling to agree on rules for how to meet their national promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris climate agreement of 2015. The official U.S. position is making it difficult.

If all the world goes to hell, don't say Jerry Brown didn't try to warn you.

"The climate [change] threat is real. It's a clear and present danger," the unconventional and legendary Democrat who will soon term out as California governor told NPR's Ari Shapiro Tuesday in an interview airing on All Things Considered. "And it's going to get here much sooner" than many people realize.

As the international climate summit in southern Poland enters its second and final week, most countries agree on the basic scientific facts: greenhouse gasses are causing climate change, and every country is feeling its effects.

But the United States, under the leadership of President Trump, has taken a different view. The administration questions the overwhelming scientific evidence suggesting that human activity is causing the climate to warm. As a result, the U.S., which has been a leader in past negotiations, is playing unpredictable role in this year's summit.

At a major climate meeting in Poland, nearly 200 countries are trying to reach a deal on dramatically reducing carbon emissions. But a recent U.N. report found that may not be enough to avoid dangerous impacts from the warming climate. In fact, the world is falling so far short of what's needed, it said, that it might be necessary to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air.

As climate negotiators from around the world meet in Poland this week and next to figure out how to keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, they are hearing some discouraging news: Emissions of the biggest pollutant, carbon dioxide, are going up.

For three years — 2014 through 2016 — the amount of atmospheric CO2 had leveled off. But it started to climb again in 2017, and is still rising.

"Last year, we thought, was a blip — but it isn't," says Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University in California.

Orlando has committed to powering itself entirely with renewable energy by 2050. Miami-Dade County has a goal to plant 1 million trees by 2020 to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy cover. Satellite Beach, south of Cape Canaveral, is implementing aggressive plans to protect itself against climate change.

Climate scientists met in Downtown Fort Lauderdale Wednesday to highlight current and future investments to try to combat the effects of sea-level rise.

The presentations, as part of the civics group the Fort Lauderdale Forum, came less than a week after a new climate assessment released by the Trump administration provided a bleak forecast for the U.S., and described an increase in extreme weather events such as fires, floods and storm surges.

Florida has elected the highest ranking Latina in the state's political history. State Representative Jeanette Nuñez will be the Lieutenant Governor alongside Republican congressman Ron DeSantis, the new Governor-elect.

Nuñez is the current Speaker Pro Tempore of the Florida House of Representatives. During her time as a state representative, she advocated for conservative tax policy to attract small businesses. She also took unique stances on issues like immigration, sponsoring a bill that would offer undocumented students in-state college tuition.